(Credits: Far Out / The Traveling Wilburys)
Sun 8 February 2026 17:30, UK
If Sparks are to be believed – in their unambiguously titled ‘Collaborations Don’t Work’ – musical collaborations and well-meaning supergroups often end up being weaker than the sum of their parts. That cannot be said, however, for The Traveling Wilburys, who perfectly captured the potential power of a supergroup, laying out the blueprint for virtually every musical collaboration since.
A uniting of such colossal songwriting powers as Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison, George Harrison, Jeff Lynne and Tom Petty was the thing of rock and roll daydreams, but it could have gone down the pan very quickly.
After all, each of those figures was, by 1988, used to having complete creative control over their own output, so it wasn’t much of a stretch to envision them routinely butting heads over a certain track or idea. In reality, though, the Wilburys seemingly got on with a surprising lack of conflict.
Not only did the band manage to avoid arguments, by and large, but they seemed to fully throw themselves into the idea of collaboration. Across those two legendary records, each track is undeniably indebted to the collaborative power of each of its members, even if only one of them appeared in the songwriting credits.
Nevertheless, there were one or two tracks on that 1988 debut which were distinctly less collaborative than others. As Jeff Lynne once recalled, during a 1989 appearance on BBC Radio 1, “Bob was the only one who had sort of a clear cut tune one day,” the ELO frontman recalled, “He came in and said, ‘What do you think of this one?’ And it was almost complete. We need to do sort of like the bridge and a chorus or something, but that was,‘Congratulations’.”
It is perhaps no surprise that Dylan was the only one to present the Wilburys with an already finished track. Even when taking into account the tireless songwriting histories of its other members, Dylan had been rattling off an utterly prolific level of songwriting mastery for nearly three decades by that point, and he didn’t show any signs of slowing down when he joined the ranks of the Wilburys.
Fittingly, then, ‘Congratulations’ was one of the eight Traveling Wilburys songs to feature Bob Dylan on lead vocals, his distinctive twang suiting the downbeat humour of the lyricism in a way which none of the other members could have pulled off quite so expertly.
Even still, the song opened itself up to collaboration in its performance, which featured the rest of the supergroup on backing vocals, along with some particularly good guitar work from Lynne.
On the face of it, you could certainly argue that ‘Congratulations’ defied the collaborative roots of The Traveling Wilburys, having come together almost exclusively at the hands of Dylan. However, if that was true then it surely would have appeared on one of the songwriter’s solo albums, instead. No, it was the performing contributions of the rest of the band that fleshed the song out, giving it the unique appeal that made it a stand-out on the band’s debut album back in 1988.
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